TWO DAYS, ONE QUESTION NOBODY COULD ANSWER There was no single headline that explained it. No earnings miss, no regulatory bombshell, no executive resignation. And yet over two consecutive trading sessions this week, the Nasdaq Composite shed 580 points on Tuesday alone, layering onto Monday’s 1.3% decline, as investors across Wall Street simultaneously, almost wordlessly,…
There’s a type of courage you don’t always notice, but it takes real guts and a special kind of patience: the courage to challenge the system from inside. Think about the researcher who puts out findings nobody wants to hear, or the judge who gives an unpopular verdict. Then there’s the administrator who tells the…
The Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2026, that was placed in Parliament in March 2026 has once again brought the debate on the regulation of foreign-funded organisations in India back into focus. While there is no doubt about the need to increase transparency and accountability of such organisations, the challenge before policymakers is one of…
A MECHANICAL ENGINEER FROM HAZARIBAGH Balwant Lal Suman spent over fifteen years as a mechanical engineer before deciding he wanted to build something of his own. From Hazaribagh, Jharkhand, with no inherited capital and no existing network into government procurement, he founded Rigtech Infra, a manufacturing unit producing pipes for infrastructure applications. The dream was…
THE MOST UNIVERSAL COMPLAINT ABOUT INDIAN ROADS Ask any regular highway commuter in India what frustrates them most, and pothole-strewn stretches and waterlogged underpasses will almost certainly make the list. Manual maintenance simply cannot keep pace with monsoon damage at the scale of a 1.46-lakh-kilometre national highway network. Ahead of the 2026 monsoon season, NHAI…
A MOUNTAIN THAT USED TO DECIDE WHO COULD TRAVEL For most of the year, the Zojila Pass has been less a road than a closed door. Snow, landslides, and a terrain so unforgiving that the average crossing time stretched to 3 hours on a good day and to nothing at all for nearly 5 months…
A NUMBER NOBODY TALKS ABOUT ENOUGH Here is a fact most Indians don’t carry in daily conversation: for most of the post-independence era, between 65 and 70 per cent of India’s military equipment was procured from abroad. Not built. Not designed. Bought often at a premium, often with strings attached, occasionally from countries whose interests…
FROM ASPIRATION TO ARCHITECTURE The PIB release on June 14, 2026 noted a significant political milestone: Prime Minister Narendra Modi became India’s longest-serving elected Prime Minister. World leaders sent congratulatory messages. But beyond the ceremony of milestone-marking, the release carried something more substantive: a statistical ledger of what twelve years of continuous governance had produced…
A CITY IS NEVER FINISHED There is a particular kind of civic grief that belongs to Indian cities. It is the grief of being perpetually almost-there. Almost-planned. Almost-drained. Almost-resilient. On June 13, 2026, at Vigyan Bhawan, New Delhi, the National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA) turned 50. It looked forward, with the urgency of a…
A TANK COMMANDER AT THE TOP The year was 1997, the last time an officer from the Indian Army’s Armoured Corps stood at the apex of the service. General Shankar Roy Chowdhury had just retired. The world was a different place with no drones, no precision-guided munitions, no cyber warfare doctrine. 29 years later, on…
